Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 26.djvu/21

Rh is 'stark naught.' It begins admirably, and prepares us to follow the fortunes of the two school-boy friends with the keenest sympathy and attention, as indeed we do up to the point at which Cruthers, now a yeoman farmer, visits and consoles his old class-mate Jonson, lying in Carlisle Castle under sentence of death for participation in the rebellion of the Forty-five. Later on the story slips limply out of the hand of its inventor and ends flatly enough. But the earlier part abounds in touches of the true Carlylean humour and pathos. The quarrel between the two boys, when Jonson, to avenge a drubbing at the hands of Cruthers, menaces his adversary with a large horse-pistol, to the dismay of Dominie Scroggs, is admirably related:

One of the boys, he saw, must leave him; the only question was, which. Cruthers' father was a staunch yeoman who ploughed his own land, but was well-to-do. Jonson's was a laird who disdained the plough, who loved to hunt and gamble, and whose 'annual consumpt of whisky was very great.' Mr. Scroggs was a gentleman that knew the world, and at length he made up his mind:—